Manufacture Smarter Blog

6/8/2018
- BY: SHELLY STOBIERSKI
While “artificial intelligence” is a trendy buzz term in manufacturing today, there’s another type of intelligence that offers you a valuable strategic advantage: competitive intelligence. This method of market research is based on using tactics to continuously monitor the market and gather information to help your company keep up with the latest innovations, trends, competitor news and potential customers.

6/1/2018
- BY: ANDY NICHOLS
An important requirement of ISO 9001 (and its “cousins,” AS9100 and IATF 16949) deals with internal quality management audits. One purpose of this internal audit program is to look at the processes within the quality management system. Common questions that internal auditors raise during this practice include, “How do I audit a process?” and “Which processes should I start with?”

5/18/2018
- BY: ANNA STEFOS
A few weeks ago, The Center’s Brian Mamo wrote about great food pairings as a way to define the combination of “sales” and “marketing” into “smarketing.” An equally dynamic pairing provides manufacturers with valuable tools for reducing waste and improving quality as well as efficiency: Lean and Six Sigma.

5/11/2018
- BY: RON QUINKERT
Now that we’re five months into the year, it’s safe to say that most of us have long-abandoned our New Year’s Resolutions. Whether we were hoping to lose weight, get better sleep or save more money, we probably forgot about our 2018 missions just about as soon as the new year started.

5/4/2018
- BY: CHUCK WERNER
Discussions of the Industry 4.0 technologies among small to medium enterprises usually take one of two paths. The first is a politely positive path where everyone ignores the impact these advancements will have on the human workforce. This is what is known as ignoring the “elephant in the room,” where there is an obvious problem at hand, but no one wants to address it.

4/27/2018
- BY: GEORGE SINGOS
Your company is working harder than ever before, with higher sales and faster production leading to the largest increase in revenue you’ve seen so far. Yet somehow profits are less than they were last year. How could this be?

4/20/2018
- BY: CHARLIE WESTRA
It can be hard to pin down exactly what a good boss does, and even more difficult to become one. For most managers, this is an ongoing process of learning from others and evolving in the hopes of becoming a true leader. But maybe this journey of growing into a great boss isn’t as complicated as you think.

4/13/2018
- BY: MIKE BEELS
People don’t like change. Learning new ways of doing things and adopting new technology can be a scary proposition. I often have clients ask, “Why do we need to change, we are already working hard?” or, “We are already profitable, why change?” The unfortunate answer is that you cannot avoid change; everything changes over time.

4/6/2018
- ​BY: ELLIOT FORSYTH
There’s no question that one of the biggest concerns we hear from our clients is finding and keeping good employees. Unfortunately, this situation is likely to only get worse. In the next decade, it is expected that of the nearly 3.5 million open U.S. manufacturing jobs, roughly 2 million are anticipated to go unfilled due to a gap in skills required for holding such jobs.

3/30/2018
- BY: ROGER TOMLINSON
With all of the moving parts within a manufacturing business (both literal and figurative), it’s easy to lose sight of strategic objectives. What if your management team had a way to actually see all of the goals and processes of your entire organization in one clear visual? Fortunately, value stream mapping provides just such a solution.